Every EV driver knows the dance: a different app for each network, a new account, another stored card, and the dread that the one charger you've driven to needs a membership you don't have. The mess has roots deeper than bad apps.
The fragmented EV charging experience — an app and account per network — is a symptom of competing commercial models and immature standards, not just poor design. Open protocols like OCPP (charger-to-back-office) and OCPI (network-to-network roaming) exist to enable interoperability and roaming, much as mobile networks let any phone roam. The question is whether the industry adopts them broadly or defends walled gardens.
Driving an electric car across several charging networks can feel like travelling through countries that each demand a different currency. One network wants its own app and a pre-loaded account; another wants a subscription; a third works only with a physical RFID card you don’t carry. Contrast this with a petrol station, where any card from any bank simply works, and the EV experience looks needlessly hostile.
It’s tempting to blame lazy app design. But the fragmentation is really a symptom of how the industry grew and which standards did — or didn’t — get adopted.
Charging networks largely built out independently, each as its own commercial business with its own app, billing and customer relationship. In a land-grab phase, locking a driver into your app and account is a feature, not a bug — it captures the customer. The result is a patchwork of closed systems that never had to talk to one another, layered on top of a market where the underlying communication standards were still maturing.
There are really two interoperability problems hiding behind the consumer frustration:
The technology to make charging feel seamless largely exists. What’s been missing is universal adoption and the commercial will to open the gardens.
Your phone roams onto any network without you thinking about it. EV charging could work the same way — the standards exist; the adoption doesn’t, yet.
The mobile-phone comparison is instructive. Roaming makes any phone work on any network, billed through your own provider, invisibly. EV charging could work that way — and where roaming agreements and open protocols are in place, it increasingly does. The obstacle is mostly commercial: a network that has invested in a captive customer base may be reluctant to let those customers roam freely, just as it may prefer drivers to use its own app.
Regulation is starting to push the other way — for example, requirements that public chargers accept ad-hoc contactless card payment, removing the app barrier entirely for casual use. The likely endpoint is a layered model: open protocols underneath, roaming across networks, and simple contactless payment as a universal fallback — with apps competing on genuine value-add rather than on locking drivers in.
Interoperable charging is fundamentally a software, protocol and systems-integration problem — exactly the kind of full-stack engineering we do. Whether it’s implementing OCPP/OCPI cleanly, integrating disparate networks, or building back-office systems that play well with others, we help operators deliver the seamless experience drivers expect. It connects to the broader reliability of public charging. Let’s talk.
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OCPP/OCPI implementation, network integration, back-office systems that play well with others — the software and protocol engineering behind a seamless driver experience. That's our work.